


Batter My Heart

by toujours_nigel



Series: Party Verse [3]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-17
Updated: 2012-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 07:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The letters brought [Sandy] shuddering back, a kindly ghost trailing at his elbow and offering acerbic commentary on his cases and his colleagues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Batter My Heart

After a single abortive attempt they limited their acquaintance to the hospital and its immediate neighbourhood. Alec found himself searching out unused rooms and obscure stairwells and once when he met Andrew in the falling afternoon light they found their way up to the roof and stood for a moment utterly reckless—there had been no planes swooping close since the night they’d met, but it felt all the same an unconscionable risk and they hurried below soon and scared. Alec’s digs were close enough and filling slowly up with books, letters, scarves Julia knit in her endless hours on the wards, scraps of tinsel and glitter Colonna’d nicked from some stage. It proved impossible to invite Andrew more than rarely, since every invitation received reciprocation, and every refusal shut something away behind Andrew’s eyes. But once in that cheerful house with its earnest faces was enough, and more than enough, and every time the boy spoke about Dave, Alec had to fight to answer in a level voice. Better on a level playing ground, with the urgency of war providing a safe and immediate distraction.

Early in July he nerved himself to read through all Sandy’s letters; there weren’t many of any length, they had—in what Alec had thought a terrible idea at the time—started sharing a flat in the third month of their acquaintance, but his love notes had filled the bottom right drawer of Alec’s bureau to overflowing in their old flat. He was sullen the next day, and very glad after to not have chanced upon Andrew. The move to London had served to put necessary distance between him and that endless day, and he had lulled himself into assuming true recovery. It only made things more difficult, impossible as it was to remember both that Sandy was gone, and that he’d ever been around: his new digs in London bore no trace of Sandy, save the bundle of letters carefully wrapped in the remnants of an old sou’wester and relegated out of sight beneath the bed, and _The Treasure Island_ tucked into a corner behind his reference texts. The letters brought him shuddering back, a kindly ghost trailing at his elbow and offering acerbic commentary on his cases and his colleagues.

The next weeks crept past in a haze. Alec knew he was doing rounds, diagnosing, assisting at operations, even stumbling his way through a conversation or three with Andrew, sticking resolutely to the most mundane of matters, which failed entirely to alleviate Andrew’s suspicions—and he was, Alec had found, jealous of affection in a way his childhood amply justified—but could be adjudged a superlative success insofar as concerned with preventing Alec from breaking down and behaving like a lunatic. There could, after all, be no explanations beyond a simple statement that he’d had a friend who’d died: even that would open the way for inevitable concern that, left unanswered, would lead Andrew into believing his friendship unwanted and everyone else to brand Dr. Deacon unnecessarily stiff upper-lip about his grief. When he walked blinking out into the sunlight after a night-shift, Ralph leaning casually against his car in full dress uniform seemed an apparition summoned by his intense loneliness.

But his eyes tracked Alec, and his mouth twisted up into a smile, and Alec shook his superstition off to come up and shake hands. Ralph felt real enough to the touch to allay his last suspicions—he couldn’t survive being found talking to himself—and presently he asked, “What brings you here?”

Ralph grinned up at him, still obstinately slouched against the hood. “Thought I might let you take me out for my birthday.”

He said, “Is it,” and counted the days over in his mind. “Of course. Couldn’t get hold of Laurie?”

“I’ve a week’s embarkation leave starting tomorrow,” Ralph said, and “I’ll start early and drive up.”

Alec had caught only the fatal words ‘embarkation leave’, and said, his last patient’s death terribly vivid and all the beloved dead looming shadowed behind her, “They’re shipping you out.” Ralph nodded, crisp in his uniform, and Alec, reaching out for an intended handshake, found himself grasping the mangled left hand in both his own, tracing the line between flesh and artifice covertly in the shadows between their bodies. “My dear. I’m so very glad for you.”

“My first captain,” Ralph said, dipping without premise or prelude as he often did into an anecdote, “old Hall, I’ve told you about him before, used to tell me he’d had his fortune told by a gypsy, and had had it prophesied he’d die in bed surrounded by his family. Oddest thing, he’d always seemed too stolid to do something like that, I was half-convinced he was testing our credulity. Week before last I had a letter from his boyfriend.”

“Informing you of his death?” He couldn’t think of another option, for all that it seemed far too pat. He had been supposed, he remembered, to wait for Andrew, who had morning shift with the ambulances, and liked to converse in the scraps of time between Alec being let off his shift and the rest of the crew coming in. But he hadn’t the energy at the moment to introduce them to each other, and any second now Ralph would turn masterful and bossy: he was tired enough he’d likely succumb to it without even a token fight, and that was a truly terrifying thought.

Ralph frowned. “No, his bitch littered, and he’s offering me first refusal, once they’re weaned. I don’t think there even is any family.” He nodded, unable to argue that the boyfriend should count. He would have, once, with Sandy nodding earnestly along. Sandy, Sandy, Christ in Heaven. “Alec,’ Ralph said, with the intonation that meant it had been said previously, “when did you last sleep? You look dead on your feet. Of course you do, you’ve just come off a night-shift, that always bitches up your sleep-cycles. Come along, my dear.”

No fight at all. Damn, damn, that wouldn’t do, wouldn’t at all. Only it was a relief to be taken by the elbow, and shut into Ralph’s car, and ignored entirely save for directions. By the time the car drew to a halt before his building, the sun was well and truly up, and a curious sluggishness had come over him. They climbed the stairs in silence, Ralph pelting ahead and waiting for him at every landing, eyes calculating and demeanour solicitous.

“It’s only the one room,” he offered, unlocking the door, and tried to look at his flat through a stranger’s eyes as Ralph stood in the doorway. It did not yet look entirely lived-in, books spilling out of boxes stacked beneath shelves, but he could hardly be faulted for neatness; Ralph had, after all, seen how ruinously and vindictively untidy he could become when he thought the occasion called for it.

Now he said only, “Go to bed, Alec. The faster you drop off the better; Theo’s demanded a complete inventory of the place, and I’ve got to keep the captain happy.”

***

He woke in mid-morning, disoriented and uncomfortable. His clothes had been neatly folded at the foot of the bed; a fresh pile stacked on a chair dragged away from his desk.

He walked into the curtained-off kitchen with every intention of thanking Ralph, and stopped short. Ralph, stretched out with his feet propped on the kitchen counter, on a chair tilted precariously back, was looking through the piles of letters on the table with an expression of growing disdain. A pitcher of water and a half-empty glass sat beside them.

“You’ve no right,” he managed, and stopped short at the anger choking his voice. Sandy’s letters, and Ralph—oh, not perusing them at any length, he’d deem that too low, but looking nonetheless, flicking a tabulating glance carelessly from one to the other. There were two stacks of letters, he saw, one considerably diminished.

“Your windows were open,” Ralph said, bringing the chair heavily down. “Damn things were all over the floor.” He shuffled the stacks together, tucked a stray note in the middle, and held them out to Alec. “I thought I might save you the trouble of putting them into order.”

He took them, stiffly holding them close to his side. “Did you sort them chronologically?”

“Oldest at the bottom,” Ralph nodded, and kicked a chair out in front of him. “Sit. D’you want tea?”

The cup was hot between his hands, almost painful; the tea scalding on his tongue. He blew on the surface, raising steam to hang between them for a moment. “I’m terribly sorry.  I should not have assumed...”

Ralph shrugged, drank some more water, and stared at the room more carefully, taking in every crooked picture and meticulous shelf. Presently he said, eyes still elsewhere, “How are you, Alec?”

“I’m alive.”He could taste the tea this time, very nearly bitter: four years ago he would have pronounced it perfect, but he had become used to sweeter concoctions. “Don’t ask for anything more.”

For a while it seemed as though Ralph would say something, remonstrate, argue, but in the end he simply tightened his mouth into a thin line, and reached a covered dish down from the worktop. “Finish this and then you’re going back to bed.”

He ate a sullen mouthful, and then another, hunger asserting itself on the point of satiation. He could feel, still, exhaustion curling through him, the three hours of sleep having leeched only the very surfeit. But it would be difficult to sleep again, he woke most days in a few hours of retiring, aching for a sleeping body to roll against his own, ghost his mouth over closed eyes, be reassured in touch. On the worst days he woke from dreams of cradling Sandy’s broken corpse; on the better he woke reaching for him. It was a function of the bed: he would have done better to sell it and buy a single—a bachelor’s bed, restricting movement and restraining dreams—but it had been their one extravagant gesture towards a settled future, and so he slept still like a widower, half the bed a cold expanse.

Presently Ralph said, “I think I’ll make it a hat-trick. Clothes, food, half your mattress.” He smiled in conscious mockery of the flickering smile he used so blatantly to charm. “Come to bed, my dear.”

***

“I was just fixing the black-out. Go back to sleep, doc.”

He felt wide-awake, now, eyes straining to make out Ralph in the gloom. “I’m done,” he said, “what time’s it?” Ralph hadn’t called him that in three years. It had been that long since they’d shared a bed, even like this, with desire dead between them. That last they never had. “I can’t sleep,” he said, when it seemed too long had passed.

Ralph nodded, took a seat at the foot of the bed. “It worried me, how indifferent you seemed in Bridstow. Why did you never say anything?”

He thought of explaining that he had felt almost indifferent in Bridstow, that he was as shocked by his current devastation as Ralph. “Who would I tell? Most of our friends make an extravagant production of grief, like an over-budgeted panto. Theo and Peter were out of station for the most part, and you... were honeymooning.”

“Alec.” He got up to put the lights on, and reverted to the other side of the bed when he returned, putting space between them. “Have you any friends here?” His fair face was drawn, the fine skin beside his eyes drawn tight, he could barely look at Alec. It felt immeasurably cruel; they had been friends for over five years.

“One,” he said, hesitating. “He’s one of the ambulance-drivers. Andrew Raynes.” Ralph laughed, a helpless startled sound. “What?”

“Alec. My dear, that’s the boy Spud was driving himself mad about. The EMS orderly.” His jaw clenched momentarily, a muscle twitching. “He thinks Bunny’s me.”

“It can’t be.”

“Of course it can. He’s about twenty; painfully innocent; a CO from a military family. Am I correct? I see. Alec. Does he know?”

“No.” It had been a matter of some consideration, in the first month. “He’s one of us, clearly enough. But he’s.” And here it was comfortable to know how Ralph would react, down to the last condescending smile. “He’s very Christian, my dear.”

Ralph laughed, easier now. “We can hardly all be heathens like you. What’s he like?”

“Very young,” he said, starting with the easiest. “Very young and very earnest and very ignorant. But he’s not stupid, for all that. And curious, I think, with nobody to talk to.” Ralph looked at him at that, on the verge of speech, and brought an old memory neatly back. “He looks a little like you, when we first met. Oh, not his colouring, or his hair, that’s common enough. He looks around as though right and wrong are etched in stone for all eyes, and it hurts him that... he’s very very young.”

“You’re in love with him,” Ralph said, quiet voice very loud in the darkness. “Oh, my dear.”

***

The hospital in the morning was a murmuring quiet, the night-shift drifting out rubbing at their eyes, squinting into the sunlight. In the wards the Night Sisters were doing one last round of the wards before heading home. Alec sat on the curb, ignoring passers-by and acquaintances staring at him. Ralph must be well on his way; he’d driven through the night, refusing to so much as drop Alec off for work before he left: too much of a farce, should they chance to meet Andrew, he’d said, and Alec had nodded assent, not quite unwilling to part from him. More epiphanies than he could bear, to be called in love with a boy who barely knew his own mind. There had been no Andrew waiting in the evening gloom, but that had done little to ease him. He felt awake after weeks walking in a daze, but was not sure that he would not rather revert—Sandy was still present, lurking quietly out of sight, waiting only for a moment of leisure to come bustling back.

The ambulances hove into sight. Andrew climbed out of the second, eyes roving over the premises and lit in a smile, spotting him. “I waited for you yesterday,” he said, and Alec found a smile for him.


End file.
